Thursday • October 30 • 2025
Vol.XVII • No.XLIV
Manchester, N.H.
One of the textbook marketing flops of all time was the Ford Edsel sedan, which was heralded as the hot new car in the late 1950s. All the automotive experts and Ford executives said it was a can’t-miss. Henry Ford (the car was named after his son) guaranteed hundreds of thousands of sales.
But one big thing went wrong. Nobody ever bothered to ask car buyers what THEY thought of the new car. (RELATED: DAVID BLACKMON: Energy Companies Are Laughing At Predictions Of ‘Peak Oil’)
Turns out they hated it. So, instead of sales of 400,000, Americans bought 10,000, and the model was embarrassingly discontinued.
The obvious lesson for the industry: you can’t bribe Americans to buy cars they don’t want. Given the all-in approach mentality for EVs at Ford and GM, it’s clear that Detroit never got this message.
Last week, Honda and General Motors announced an end to their two-year collaboration in building a platform for lower-cost EVs. Honda execs said it was “too hard.”
Amazingly, less than 10% of all new car sales are EVs over the last two years. This is despite the fact that the U.S. government is writing a $7,500 check to people for buying an EV, and some states are kicking in $5,000 more.
The Texas Policy Foundation calculates that all-in EV subsidies can reach $40,000 per vehicle. It would practically be cheaper for the government to purchase a new gas vehicle for every American car buyer.
Meanwhile, the news is even worse for wind and solar power. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that “clean energy” investment funds are tanking, with some down as much as 70% in recent months. Solar has been one of the worst-performing industry stocks this year.
This collapse is happening right when Exxon and Chevron have engineered a combined $110 mega — acquisition to expand oil and gas drilling in the Permian Basin in Texas — one of the biggest oil fields in the world. They both just reported their largest profits ever.
They and their investors are looking at the real-world data, not green energy propaganda. In 2023, the world has used more fossil fuels than any time in human history, even as the developed countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to stop oil, gas, and coal.
All of this is to say that there in NO “global energy transition” going on. If there is one, it’s away from green energy, not toward it.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and chief economist at Freedom Works.
Stephen Moore | Daily Caller News Service
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New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and I agree on several things. Lowering taxes (or eliminating them) is good. Shoring up protections for the right to self-defense is critical. And refusing to fund Berlin’s Burgess Biomass boondoggle was the right thing to do.
Last week, the governor’s veto of another legislated Burgess bailout survived an attempted override. A bailout that was only made possible with Republican votes, so it wasn’t just Democrats doing us dirty. Sununu did us a favor, and the failure to override seemed likely. You only need a handful of ignorant Republicans in this legislature to promote a bad idea, but you need a lot more of them to make it stick the landing after a veto.
The override tried to vault the veto but failed to achieve the necessary height, what I’d call an example of the process working, and it has drawn a bit of ink in the media, local and national. Depending on what you think about it, you’ll agree or disagree with this take or that. But Burgess was never going to make money. It was a money pit (the rates necessary to show a profit the fiscal equivalent of gang rape). The jobs it creates destroy them elsewhere in the economy. Environmentalists don’t even like burning wood for power. Taxpayers and ratepayers would forever be bailing the thing out to pay more for their electricity.
You might as well burn money, which – given the trajectory of the Biden economy, may soon be cheaper, so – taking a hint from Grokster Ian Underwood – we’d suggest that anyone who feels that strongly about saving those jobs bail them out themselves.
Back in June, I explained how this might work. You could pay the employees to do nothing and save New Hampshire ratepayers and taxpayers millions more than trying to keep the facility online.
I don’t know what Burgess Biomass employees make or the five-score timber folks, but can we agree it’s probably less than 100,000 per year?
If we gave the Biomass folks each 60K to do nothing (which is the national income average), it would cost 1.8 million. Add the 200 timber workers, and that’s another 12 million. Paying them not to increase our electric rates would save New Hampshire ratepayers over 135 million dollars on top of the reduced cost of electricity from not having to pay higher rates.
We’d continue to save more, even if we had to extend the severance for several years, than if Sununu signed HB142.
When it costs less to subsidize inactivity, that thing you want has problems. Burgess biopower has problems.
The problem with building a business model on what amounts to a government subsidy is that one’s survival depends on favorable treatment by politicians. That’s never a good place to be.
Burgess wound up with a worse deal than it had initially anticipated. After ratepayers had been forced to pay it $100 million above market rates for electricity, any future payments above the market price had to be refunded. It hit that cap years earlier than expected, thanks to technological advances that lowered the price of natural gas. It then exceeded the cap, necessitating repayments to ratepayers, which it could hardly afford.
We can probably agree that Democrats, by majority, are the more enthusiastic advocates for bailing out Burgess (along with Market Meddling Republican NH Senators Jeb Bradley and Kevin Avard – to name but two). From where I sit, neither has much trouble raising money to exercise political force to take ours. What if they just skipped the middleman and funded Burgess themselves?
It would never happen because people like that never throw “their” money down these holes. They run for elected office to use the force of law to feed these bottomless pits with the fruit of our labors. And while Burgess is in limbo today, Bradley and the Dems still have an itch in their green pants to get this done.
The Burgess Bailout will be back, and we’ll need Sununu to veto it again before he ends his service in the Governor’s Office.
HT | JBartlett
The post Bradley’s Burgess Biomass Boondoggle is Back in the News appeared first on Granite Grok.